I attended the Christian Science Sunday School whenever possible from the age of six and endeavored to live what I had been taught. Very early I found myself without a home or financial support.
Accepting a false sense of responsibility, I left school after nine years, renounced an artistic career already begun, and without training went to work to support myself and my mother. Moved largely by a personal sense of goodness, I reached some degree of unselfish affection; but I did not understand what Mrs. Eddy so beautifully explains in Science and Health (p. 79):"Giving does not impoverish us in the service of our Maker, neither does withholding enrich us." With this darkened sense of giving, I accepted privation unresistingly, and self-denial and restriction as being inevitable.
But even as the tares of disappointment and blighted hopes appeared in my thinking, the good wheat of spiritual enrichment was coming up. For comfort I turned to Christian Science more earnestly, studied the Lesson-Sermon in the Christian Science Quarterly, and devoured the Christian Science periodicals, developing an enthusiasm for The Christian Science Monitor. This activity, together with class instruction in Christian Science at an early age, gradually drew my thinking away from self and closer to God, while at the same time bringing out what the best formal education might have been expected to do—the ability to think more deeply, clearly, and universally. As a result of this spiritual education I have been able to write for radio and newspapers (including the Monitor), publish several books, and handle correspondence for The Mother Church in Boston, working side by side with graduates from universities in this and other lands.
